The Death of an Irish Lass (3 page)

“That’s not all that’s fine on her, neither,” Daly whispered to McGarr.

“You fancy her, do you?”

Daly was a bit tight himself. He leaned close to McGarr and said in a rush, “God, I’d cut off my—” he paused, “—toes, if she’d have me just for a night. A woman like that…” His voice trailed off and there was a faraway look in his eyes.

“Have you approached her, I wonder?” asked McGarr.

“Me?” Daly rocked back on his heels, his long chin upon his chest.

“Why not? She sounds like a jolly girl to me. There’s no harm in trying.”

Daly shook his head. “She’s jolly, all right, but there’s them that have tried. And I’ll say no more about that.” He glanced down the bar.

“Hey, there!” May Quirk’s uncle roared. He began shuffling toward them with the aid of a cane. He was a tall, stout man with a red porous nose and blond hair that was turning white so that it looked dirty.

“It’s none of your damn business,” said the bartender.

“It’s not, is it?”

“No. You’re not in this company.” He meant the group around McGarr at the bar.

“May Quirk is my niece and I’ll not have you talking low about her in my presence.” He reached over Daly, grabbed McGarr by the shoulder, and spun him around. McGarr nearly fell off the stool and his drink sloshed against his chest, wetting his shirt and pants.

“Christ!” said the publican, reaching for a bar rag.

“What’s happened to May Quirk, little man?” the uncle roared. “And why are you asking all these questions? You’ll answer up fast or I’ll know why not!”

Daly attempted to step between them, but the man shoved him out of the way like he was a bit of fluff. In spite of his years, he was still a strong man.

McGarr looked up from his wet shirt and fixed the man with his gaze. He said, “You can best show your concern for May Quirk now by keeping your voice down and your hands to yourself. If you’ll wait for me outside, I’ll talk to you in private in a minute.”

The old man blinked several times, then turned and shambled out the door.

McGarr stepped off the stool.

“Here, have your drink first, Inspector,” said the bartender, rushing to fill his glass.

McGarr shook his head. “I can’t. Much as I’d like to. I’ve got a full day’s work ahead of me. What do I owe you?”

The publican stepped away from the bar. “Not a thing,” he said in a louder voice. “The round is on me. It’s been our pleasure to have a drink with you.”

“Please,” McGarr objected.

“No.” He shook his head. “I insist. And I wish you luck with whatever you’re about, here in Lahinch.”

Nobody was talking. They all sensed McGarr’s business was serious. What was more, McGarr guessed, it had been a month of Sundays since the publican had been so generous.

He turned, shook hands with Michael Daly once again, and started for the door.

“You forgot your note,” said the publican. He pointed to the bank note on the bar.

“That’s for the next round,” McGarr said and waved going out the door.

Outside, McGarr directed the old man into the shadows of a doorway and told him what had happened to May Quirk. He then advised him to do what he thought best, after Dan O’Malley had been to the Quirk house. He had to grab hold of the big man to keep him from falling. Old Quirk’s eyes gushed as though his tear ducts had burst, but he didn’t make a sound. McGarr took his arm and walked him slowly to his Cooper, where he eased him into the passenger seat.

Climbing behind the wheel, McGarr called the Technical Bureau van on his police radio. When Chief Superintendent McAnulty came on, McGarr said,
“Can you ascertain if that car really hit the wall alongside it, Tom?”

“Already have and it did but it didn’t.” McAnulty’s voice was excited, like that of a child playing a particularly enjoyable game. “Although somebody has taken great pains to see that it looks that way. The stone, you see, is somewhat porous, and if the car had struck these particular pieces, some of its paint would have become lodged in them. Well, that’s happened, but all the stones that contain the paint don’t conform to all the striations on the body of the car.

“And the rear fender has just a little more rust on the bared metal than the scratches along the side. None of it is visible to the naked eye, but it’s there, all right.

“Now then, as for the scratches themselves. The ones that were made up here and recently—I’d say sometime last night—were put there by a sharp instrument, which had substances on it that we’re betting are dirt or earth or animal slurry.”

“Like a pitchfork.”

“You’re a smart man, Chief Inspector.”

“Are you going to search below the cliffs?”

“You can bet your bonnet we are. And I’ve got another little something for you. It’s not certain, but the doctor guesses she was pregnant.”

Her uncle turned and looked at McGarr, wide-eyed. He then slowly rolled down the window and looked out.

“Anything else?”

“Just one thing. You’ll see a Wolsey parked near the greengrocer’s on a corner near the church. It’s black and kind of battered. My missus and the kids are in it. Can you tell her to go on without me? Tell her I’ll catch a lift later.”

“How much later?” McGarr speculated that telling Tom McAnulty’s wife what he wished would be a trying experience. “I thought you were on holiday?”

“Well—I am and I’m not. You know how it is, Peter. At least I’m away from my desk, amn’t I?”

But McGarr knew how it would be, and it was. Mrs. McAnulty said, “You mean to tell me he’s had us waiting here in this heat for hours now and all along he had no intention of returning?”

McGarr was leaning in the window of the car. Four little children in back were looking at him shyly. One little girl couldn’t keep from giggling. McGarr said, “I wouldn’t presume to know his intentions, Mary.”

“Well then, where’s your wife?”

McGarr had been afraid of this. Without McAnulty to abuse she was going to seize upon the man nearest at hand, but McGarr didn’t want to make McAnulty’s position with her worse than it was. “Dublin, of course.” That was a lie.

“I suppose you’re as much of a demon for the job as his nibs.”

McGarr reached back and tousled the little girl’s blond locks. “He’s a real professional, your Tom is. He doesn’t get half the credit he deserves. There’s not a man who could take his place.”

She slid behind the wheel and started the car. “Perhaps not in the Technical Bureau,” she said. “Perhaps not there.” She roared away.

McGarr drove May Quirk’s uncle to the Garda barracks, where he asked one of the officers to see the old man home and stay with him for a while. He was, McGarr had learned, a widower and without family.

McGarr then strolled over to a cafe in the middle of Lahinch, where he tried to ignore the purported Veal
Cordon Bleu on the menu, knowing that it would be in some major way a disappointment. Long ago McGarr had learned to avoid the pretensions of most Irish country restaurants, but the rest of the fare seemed to be only mixed grill, mutton, fried fish and chips, Irish boiled dinner, or round steak, and after debate he succumbed to the temptation.

Sun poured in the window onto a spanking linen tablecloth and the open window of the dining room allowed him to hear the talk of the passersby on the sidewalk. After all the whiskey he had drunk, the tea was refreshing, which was the most that could be said for the meal. How the cook could have allowed such fine scallops of milk-fed veal to scorch amazed McGarr. It was such a moment that made McGarr regret his decision to quit the European continent and take his present job with the Garda. On the Continent McGarr had grown accustomed to thinking of each meal as an event to be anticipated with no little joy. When his expectations had been met in full, McGarr was suffused with a sense of well-being. Such a moment made him feel very fortunate to number among those of the species who were so elect as to share his time and place, in particular a choice table in whatever restaurant, inn, trattoria, cafe, bistro, or gasthaus that had pleased him.

These other moments, however, plunged him into a funk.

In such a mood, McGarr climbed into the Cooper, collected Dan O’Malley at the Garda barracks, and drove toward the Quirk farmhouse.

THE QUIRK FARM
lay along the road between Lahinch and Kishanny, up a winding, hilly road between tall earthen banks and hedgerows. McGarr had to slow at each turn to make sure the car didn’t slam into the side of a cow or clip through a flock of sheep. He waited twice while farmers waved their arms and directed their dogs after errant sheep. The farmers only smiled and tilted their heads to the side, a form of silent hello all over Ireland. Superintendent O’Malley, who was sitting beside McGarr, waved to them all.

The Quirk property ran up the side of a steep hill. The garden by the road became in turn a potato patch, a pasture, rough forage, and finally, like much of the terrain in this part of Clare, a bald summit of rough gray rock. Near the top McGarr could see the odd white patch—sheep that had been left out to God and were collected twice a year for shearing, dipping, or sale. In all, the Quirks had little more than forty acres.
Had they tried to farm it all, they could barely wrest subsistence from this poor land.

Like many farm families, they had two houses. The smaller, its lime now fading back to mortar, was doubtless the house John Quirk had been born in. It was now used as a stable. The new house was, to McGarr’s way of thinking, one of the finest accomplishments of the Republic. For the last thirty years the government, through low-interest loans, subsidies, and direct grants, had been helping farmers build new houses with modern facilities. McGarr had visited other English-speaking countries in which no planning was evident in the selection of dwelling styles, and the tastes of the builders who had raised whole square miles of tight-packed oddities—some mere boxes with roofs, others grotesqueries conceived by addled brains—were suspect, to say the least. The new Irish farmhouse was no work of art, mind you, but it was pleasant to look at. The structure blended with the landscape and was built to last generations, if not centuries. Even the interior walls were either poured concrete or cinder block. The rooms were spacious and well lit by casement windows. Each house had at least a full bath and water closet. Most roofs were tiled. In short, the government had provided its people with a house any European peasant could be proud of.

McGarr suffered no delusions about Ireland. The base of his country’s economy was agriculture, and most of his countrymen were farmers. As one who had lived with the effects of industrialization in other countries, McGarr wouldn’t have Ireland any other way than what it had been since recorded time—perhaps the finest bit of natural pasturage in all Europe. Certainly there was a hot demand for the products
such a country could supply on a grand scale, given certain improvements in farming methods. Many of the Continental countries even now couldn’t feed their populations.

But Clare was another story. Clare was rock, albeit picturesque rock. Stepping out of the Cooper, McGarr remembered what an old woman in Lisdoonvarna had once told him when he had remarked about vistas in that rugged terrain: “Ah, lad—could we but eat that beauty, things would be grand.”

Superintendent O’Malley said, “I’d prefer to do the telling alone, if you don’t mind.”

“I’ll take a gander out back, then,” said McGarr.

An old man was standing in the doorway now. “Is it about May that you’ve come?” he asked O’Malley.

O’Malley removed his blue Garda cap. “Maybe we better go inside, John. The news isn’t good.”

McGarr walked around the outbuildings: an old barn in which cows were once kept before the new house was built, a three-bay hayrick, the old house, in the main room of which a Massey-Ferguson tractor now sat—and stopped at the garden. The cabbages were big but withering, as were the cauliflower, squash, and turnip plants. However, the quarter acre of potatoes farther up the hill seemed to be reveling in the hot, dry weather. In other fields McGarr could see corrugated folds of earth that marked former potato beds.

He reached down and plucked a bright red tomato from the shadows of a plant. The vines were loaded with them, nobody seeming to care that they had fruited, grown prime, and now were beginning to rot back. He bit into it. The flavor was as sweet as anything he could ever hope to taste. A mere second it had been from vine to mouth. And no chemical fertilizer or
insecticide had ever touched this land, he didn’t doubt.

At that moment, looking down the valley toward Lahinch and the ocean beyond, McGarr wished fervently that he had taken his uncle’s farm in Monaghan when it had been offered to him twenty-five years ago, that he had become a farmer and raised a tribe and followed his country’s footballers into Croke Park of a Sunday afternoon to cheer for his boys. In Rathmines, where McGarr now lived, he hardly knew more than a half-dozen people who lived on his street.

But, he supposed, there was another side to this idyllic picture before him. The urban world had so intruded on the Clares and Donegals of Ireland that few young people chose to remain. Television, the press, movies, and magazines had made so many other places seem so much more glamorous that the young people were off as soon as they were old enough to scrape up the money. And few returned.

McGarr thought of May Quirk and New York, and he knew what would greet him when he entered the house: two old people who had been forced into a sort of isolation in a farmhouse with nobody but themselves and some neighbors like them; in short, no real reason to have more than a small garden, a couple of chickens, and two dozen sheep. McGarr only hoped they were strong, for the death of their daughter would hit them doubly hard.

McGarr didn’t bother to knock. He opened the front door and stepped into a hallway. The parlor door was open. The room was filled with two stuffed chairs, a divan, and a thick rug, all in some red color, and a sideboard with Waterford crystal on top. The mantel of the glazed-brick fireplace held an eight-day clock made in Japan and a gilded-frame picture of their only and now
dead daughter, May. But something else on the sideboard caught McGarr’s eye—a half-empty, open bottle of Canadian Club.

Superintendent O’Malley seemed lost, both in the immensity of the divan and in his own thoughts. His blue eyes had clouded. He was gently touching his fingers to the plush of the upholstery. The balls of the clock spun in its vacuum. McGarr could hear a woman crying somewhere within the house and the low voice of an old man trying to soothe her. McGarr poured himself a very large whiskey, drank that off, and poured himself another. He filled a second glass and handed it to O’Malley. He then made a cursory search for the cap to the Canadian Club. He could find it neither in the parlor dustbin nor in the kitchen.

After a while, John Quirk appeared in the doorway. He was a very tall man who had once carried a heavy frame. Now his neck was thin, his head skull-like, eyes sunken. His jawbone was visible right back to his ears, which were large and hairy. His face, however, like his daughter’s, was long and regular. His hand, which McGarr took, was massive and had once been heavily calloused. He wore a green woolen shirt and gray pants held up by leather suspenders. His socks were black.

McGarr poured him a drink.

“You’re from Dublin, are you?” John Quirk asked McGarr when he handed the old man the glass.

McGarr nodded.

“Are you going to catch the villain who did this to my May?”

McGarr nodded again.

“How can you be so sure?” The old man set the glass on a small table next to the stuffed chair in which he now sat. White doilies covered the back and arms of it.

“I won’t stop until I do.”

“That’s easy to say,” said Quirk.

“He’s the best, John,” said O’Malley. “He’ll find the bastard. For my money, we got him already. Like I told you.”

Quirk wasn’t listening to O’Malley. “And what will you do when you find him?”

“I’ll try to make it so he’ll get hanged,” said McGarr without hesitating. He knew what Quirk wanted to hear, and in fact it was the way he was feeling then too.

Quirk nodded his head. He then turned and looked at the picture of his daughter on the mantel.

From where he sat, McGarr couldn’t tell if the photographer had added the blush to May Quirk’s young cheeks, but she looked fresh and innocent, with a happy smile and a big space between her two front teeth, which then had not been capped. Knowing how she had been murdered was enough to mist the eyes of even McGarr, who had sat through many such interviews and was in his own way a very hard man indeed.

“How did he do it to her?”

“P—, poison,” O’Malley said. “Something new and quick. She didn’t suffer a bit. Must have spiked her drink.”

“But why?” Quirk asked.

“That’s the reason we’re here,” said McGarr. “Perhaps if we can gather the facts quickly, we can get right on the trail of whoever it was. What can you tell me about your daughter? I understand she’s been away for quite some time now.” He stood, holding his empty glass.

“Oh,” said Quirk suddenly. “Help yourself.”

“It’s a shame the cap’s missing. All its strength will escape.”

“Jim Cleary from next door gave it to me like that. Last night.” Quirk turned to O’Malley. “Strangest thing. He just knocked on the door and when I opened it he thrust that thing at me. He looked like something or somebody had scared him witless. Do you suppose—?”

O’Malley shook his head. “Not Jim Cleary. He’s just getting a little soft is all. Sure and you know him better than me. He’s as gentle as a lamb and has always been. Even when he’s on the drink.”

But Quirk wasn’t listening. Again he had turned to look at the picture of his daughter on the mantel. “She was a changed girl when she came back from America. Forgetful like, and distracted. She had something on her mind, that’s for sure. First night, instead of staying home here with her ma and pa like she hadn’t done in ten years, she went out to the pubs, like some day laborer or strumpet. I don’t know what the world’s coming to. When I was a lad, women stayed at home where they belonged. And they got married and had children. I don’t know.” The old man rocked his head from side to side. “I’ve always said the drink is the curse of Ireland, something gutter snipes and desperadoes use for blood.” McGarr was just pouring himself another small glass. The old man added, “Begging your pardon, sir.”

McGarr asked, “Did your daughter have a drinking problem?”

“Oh, God no. At least I would say that she didn’t. I mean, I wouldn’t rightly know. But every night she went out, Aggie and me waited up for her. Not once could I even tell she had had a drop. She wasn’t tired or groggy. Several times we stayed up until dawn.” Yet again he turned and looked at his daughter’s picture on the mantel and then bit his lip. “I knew there was
something in the wind. She wasn’t acting like that because she wanted to. I don’t care how many years she spent in New York. I know my May. It’s the upbringing that counts.” His hand jumped to his face. Not knowing what to do with it, he scratched his forehead.

McGarr took out his wallet and removed May Quirk’s $27,000. He reached over and placed the crisp bills on the table beside Quirk. “That’s your daughter’s money, Mr. Quirk.”

O’Malley glanced at McGarr. Officially, the money was evidence which should have been held until it was ascertained that May Quirk did indeed own it. But McGarr wasn’t about to go by the rules with these people. He didn’t think of the money as compensation, but it might help them over the months of sadness, when, he supposed, neither of them would feel much like working.

With quaking hands and fingers that seemed too numb or rough to separate them, Quirk tried to fan the bills. “I don’t understand. No amount of money will ever bring her back.”

“And we don’t want it, neither,” said an old woman from a doorway that led to a hall and bedrooms beyond. “That’s dirty Fenian money it is, and what’s responsible for my poor baby’s death.” Her hand groped for the jamb.

O’Malley stood to help her.

She fended him off and walked unsteadily toward the divan. Her legs were like thin sticks and red from sitting too close to an electric fire. She was wearing an old, flower-print dress—green holly sprigs with red berries—and a wool cardigan worn through at the elbows. Her hair was thin and very white. Her face had once been handsome, but, like her husband’s, far too
thin. Her cheekbones were prominent knobs and her false teeth seemed to be a bad fit. McGarr imagined that the Quirks, like many older people out here in the West, cooked only when they had company. Otherwise it was tea and cake, potatoes once in a while, and an odd rasher in the pot. Much of the produce in the garden out back had been left past prime.

When she had eased herself into the cushions of the divan, O’Malley asked, “What makes you say it’s Fenian money, Aggie?”

There were red circles around both her eyes. Otherwise her face seemed bloodless. “Didn’t she have a shooter in her handbag?”

Her husband was surprised.

“I saw it myself when she kept digging for them scented cigarettes of hers what smelled like a cabbage patch under the torch. Big as a gangster’s it was. How else can you explain that?”

She didn’t wait for a reply. “Oh, I know how it is. I’ve read about it in the papers. Our poor innocent kids get over there to New York and after a few years they think they know it all. And then they meet up with a cutie, some little good-for-nothing chancer from hunger who’s got a nose for the fast buck and an easy mark. He gets ahold of a pretty young thing like May and asks her how Irish she is. And to prove it, over there where everybody’s pretty much of everything and nothing much of what’s good, she starts collecting money—handouts, mind you, just like plain begging it is—from other misguided country people. They think it’s going to the patriots and rebels, you know, the ones what freed the country from the British. But it’s not. It’s going straight into the pockets of the dirty little dodgers like that one in New York, or them in Derry
and the Bogside, the ones what would rather kill than work, the ones what are blowing people out of the seats in London restaurants. Or the one what did whatever he did to May.” She made a fist with her right hand and pushed it into her forehead. “The craven coward, may he die a thousand hideous deaths!” She began sobbing.